


dogwatch ficlets

by Elizabeth Perry (watersword)



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-01
Updated: 2006-06-01
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:45:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watersword/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Perry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/potc_dogwatch">potc_dogwatch</a>'s <cite>Dead Man's Chest</cite> countdown.</p>
    </blockquote>





	dogwatch ficlets

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [potc_dogwatch](http://community.livejournal.com/potc_dogwatch)'s Dead Man's Chest countdown.

### Savvy

"An' that's how it happened, savvy?" Jack explains, flinging a wrist toward the horizon, where a thin line of smoke breaches the sky.

"Aye," the man with the big damn pistols a few feet away says, "I kennit." Jack grins, and sloshes toward the shore; the man rests one hand on his gun-butt. "And why should I help one who has left behind so much death, Captain? _Delah_?" he says, and lifts a hand to gesture along the flat surface of the sea.

"Are your hands any cleaner?" Jack snaps.

"I deal in lead," he says. "Do'ee ken?"

"I'm the sea's till I die and after," Jack says, and hopes like hell the man understands. "Savvy?"

### 882

Elizabeth always hated rules. She cracked them, fractured them, splintered a few, ignored many, and outright broke the rest. But there were some rules that she loved — mathematics.

She had mastered Euclid by the time she was thirteen, and her governess gave up in despair, setting her to work the modern [Mercenne prime theorems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime). One day, she began to scribble on sheets of foolscap for her alloted hour, as she always did; but today, all the equations came out to the same number — 882.

"I don't _understand_ it," she complained to Will Turner that afternoon. "I _know_ it's all wrong, but the figures simply won't go right!"

Will smiled nervously, the left side of his mouth quirking upwards. "It's queer," he agreed, "but it suits you."

"Not being able to do simple arithmetic?" she demanded.

He shook his head. "Oh, no, miss Swann. It's — that's the number in all the pirate stories," he explained, and Mr Brown came around the corner, shouting for him. Elizabeth stared after him thoughtfully, and found she didn't mind so much anymore.

### Gold

Hector had grown up hearing stories of both his namesakes: his mother's uncle, and the prince of Troy. Great-Uncle Hector had died in a duel; the ancient hero had died defending his city.

He always had the feeling that acting honourably was a sure way to die.

But _looking_ honourable and not bothering with the troublesome moral demands that seemed to go along with it — ah, that had possibilities.

When he began to thieve, he would drop some of the largest, shiniest gold coins into collection plates on Sundays. It was terrible, really, how often churches were robbed nowadays.

### Batten down the hatches

Jack Sparrow was twelve when he went to sea. He got his sea-legs almost instantly, ate hardtack with all the evidence of enjoyment anyone needed, and took to rum with almost amusing rapidity.

He loved it all; until the first great gale.

He was knocked about by the swinging ropes, bowled over by sailors scrambling to and fro, and drenched by the green waves breaking over the deck.

"Batten down the hatches!" Van der Klempt shouted, and Jack launched himself at the hatch; his fingers were promptly caught in the hinge.

Jack has never quite forgiven storms; nor the phrase _batten down the hatches_.

### Sunset

Sunset is a dreadful time. Sunset is when one's elder brother bids one good-bye before departing for boarding-school; his carriage will leave at dawn, and a sleeping six-year-old cannot be woken at such times, and certainly not by Miss Pennyroyal.

Sunset is when one feels oneself alone, truly alone, for the first time; sunset is when one ceases to be a child.

Sunset is when one watches one's no-longer-fiancee kiss another man; when one is alone once more, with no hope for any relief.

Sunset is when one loses everything, along with the light and heat of the day

### Sorrow

A _daughter_! A daughter is no use at all, he thinks, he has no idea of how to help a girl along her path in life, and a girl will—oh, Lord, a girl will need coming-out and a dowry and all sorts of things. A daughter is not what he had hoped for; and the physician is still at his elbow.

"What is it?" he demands.

"Your wife, sir," the man says. "She lost a great deal of blood, sir, and I fear—"

Weatherby knows that tone of voice; he heard it for each of his parents, and only recently at that. Maria will not see morning.

What is he to do with a daughter and no wife? Even a wife he does not particularly _like_—Maria has been a disappointment, he will own that, her youth a handicap, her wit mere viciousness in disguise, her beauty a weapon to force him jealous.

He rubs his forehead. "Where is she?" he asks.

"Her chambers, sir," Dr Kingston says, surprised.

"Not my _wife_," he says, abruptly very tired. "The child."

"Oh. Ah. She is also —"

"Oh, for the love of God," Weatherby mutters. "Get it out of there, it needn't _watch its mother die_."

The physician swallows. "She won't remember," he says, "but I shall call the nurse."

The babe looks nothing like Maria, Weatherby finds, when he finally bothers to examine it. Maria's grass-green eyes have become earth-brown, her dimpled chin is smoothed, her crow's-wing curls are the pale color of a sparrow's wing. Elizabeth, named for his own mother, in the absence of any instruction, the nurse informs him nervously, does not cry; she stares at him as he stares at her.

He need not mourn that he has a daughter, he realizes, the girl need not be a replica of her mother; that would have been cause for sorrow, indeed.

### Wenches

Scarlet laughs at the preachers who occasionally venture into Tortuga's port and even more occasionally into her taverns. They talk about unselfish love, about damnation, about rejoicing when a sinner chooses to come home.

Scarlet knows all about love and its absence. Scarlet knows what it is to be damned. Scarlet knows what kind of choice a sinner ever has—none at all.

A daughter of a whore must become a whore; Scarlet has never had any name but a wench's. Giselle chose hers when she came (Scarlet's never asked why, even in the midst of what might be called passion by someoneless tired then they), and Scarlet envies her even that.

### Storm

The _Dauntless_ is not, actually. Is not dauntless. She is ashamed of herself, somewhere deep in her hull, but it's true.

She's terrified of storms, afraid of lightening slamming down on her mast and shattering it, always worrying, even in calms, about the slickness of rain making her deck slick (what if a midshipman should lose his footing? They're so good about polishing her and keeping her wood smooth, but what if that should recoil on them, like those guns they keep adding more of, weighing her down, making her sluggish no matter how hard she tries to catch even the slightest breezes), frightened of the endless vibrations of thunder as it makes every nail quiver.

She tries to outrun the storms, but she always fails.

### Freedom

Giselle stopped counting the bruises after two weeks. Already she was afraid that she would run out of numbers.

But she never forgot them.

They became muddled, merged; memory is a tricksy thing, but she knew, always, what a bruise just _there_ felt like, how hard you had to kick _here_ for the sharp sound of bone.

Prostitution is a dirty business, in every way; but she made her own rules. "Hit me, and I hit back," she told the men; the ones whom didn't believe her soon did. Some even asked for her the next time, and _that_ was a heady feeling.

### Treasure

_Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate_, he said; but Jack was wrong. Elizabeth's hair has turned silver like light on water; her skin, always a warm honey, has become the burnished tint of old coins.

Elizabeth has always been a treasure — not always his, although she still swears she's never been anyone else's — but now, all the obvious beauty of her youth gone, her bones are sharp against her skin and he is afraid that he will lose her; that she will slip through his fingers; and Will is sure that she is more precious with every indrawn breath.

### Directional

The compass-needle spins; it doesn't point north. It's a useless artefact, but it's all Jack has for direction.

He meets the Swann lass (an unfortunate phrase, the Swann lass nearly drowns and she sets him free to be arrested again) and the needle sticks in the eastern hemisphere. He meets the Turner boy (an unfortunate phrase, the Turner boy locks him in a smithy and breaks him out of jail, saves his life) and the needle steadies, pointing Jack not at Isla de Muerta but toward his true destination.

### Hope

Sugar is not sweet. Sugar is sharp-edged and heavy, tastes like sweat and blood, shouts from the next cane row over and the thud of feet on mud, the whistle of the overseer's whip.

Anamaria keeps her head low and peers through her lashes, through the stalks, through the sun, to the water, impossibly distant and impossibly cool.

_Someday_, she promises herself,_ someday I'll be there_.  


### Silent as the grave

_...you will contemplate all possible meanings of the phrase silent as the grave. Do I make myself clear?_

No. Jack knows how silent graves aren't. Jack has seen graves open and the dead roll out, as if waking up from an afternoon doze, has seen their jaws gape open and seen the empty space between, dark with bloody prophecies.

And that was before he ever saw the _Pearl_.

### Eunuch

Cotton cannot sing. Not anymore. When he was a boy, he had a voice too sweet for a girl's and too high for a boy's — as if something knew he would be struck dumb in the years ahead. There are recompenses, of course; he's heard near all of Jack Sparrow's tales, and the man can spin a yarn like no other. And the women like him.

More than like him.

He's heard stories of the Italians who have nothing 'tween their legs and voices like angels'; he's not sure which he'd prefer, to have his singing back and no women, or every whore in Tortuga and no tongue to croon with.

### Kissing the gunner's daughter

"Will," Elizabeth said, her voice tight, "what are you _doing_?"

He glanced up, startled, from his task of undoing all the thousands (it seemed) of tiny buttons on her nightdress. "Undressing you," he said, bewildered.

"_Why_?"

"Elizabeth," he said slowly, "did no one explain to you —"

She turned away.

"Oh, _Elizabeth_," he said, and stood up, his arms going around her waist. "It's all right. I'm really not half-bad at this, I promise. You'll enjoy it."

"How do _you_ know?" she demanded, her body taut under his hands. The delicate embroidery of her shift was soft, but rougher than skin, and he bit back a gasp, wanting the smoothness of her flesh instead of cotton.

He flushed, and stammered a moment before blurting, "You know Sikes? The gunner? His daughter and I, we —"

She slapped him.

### Truth

"Tell me about how you got the _Pearl_," she says on nights she can't sleep. "Tell me the true story."

He spins a tale of a hermit, who lived on bread and honey (the color of your skin, love), in the midst of a desert. How he had to beg the wind to carry him there, a full day and a full night, sand pricking his eyes until he fell  
asleep, cradled by gusts and breezes. How the hermit couldn't speak but only caw like a raven, and how his hands were beautiful (long fingers like Will's and pale as the commodore's wig), and how he drew a map in the sand of where Jack was to go.

"Is that the truth?" she asks, already drowsing.

"Of course not, darling. Man must keep some secrets."

### The opportune moment

"Jack," Bill sighs when Jack sidles into the tavern, face marked red. "Jack, Jack, Jack." He pushes a mug toward the lad and sighs. He tries not to give advice unless he's asked, but the boy sorely needs it.

"Good evenin'," Jack says, with those affected manners of his.

Bill nods and takes a very long dram. It's worse than he thought. He can distinguish three separate handprints, at least, on Jack's skin.

Jack glances at him through his lashes, as long as a woman's, for a moment, before swallowing some beer. "Bill," he says.

"Just one thing," he says. "Just _one_, Jack, for the love of god. Wait."

Jack blinks.

"Wait for the opportune moment," Bill elaborates, and something like revelation lights in Jack's eyes.

### The sea

She didn't know there was anything special about him at first. He seemed like all the other dry fleshy things. Then he came to her of his own accord; that was rare.

That was when she first noticed him, to tell the truth, which she always does _(the sea never lies, lad_). He came to her freely, and he asked for her blessing (_the sea's love is powerful, my boy_); which she barely remembered how to give. It had been many, many seasons, many moons, many birds and fish and sharks dead in her waters since anyone had asked, and many more than that she had granted it. She reached out to feel him, interested, and found that he was heavy with salt already, that his blood throbbed to her rhythms, that he breathed with the riptide.

_The sea, if she takes you, will never let you go. Be careful before you surrender to her._

### Home

It's a bitter cold night that he comes in through the French window. There's ice in his hair, and his clothes are stiff. He smiles, and his teeth flash like sunset, the last vestiges of light. He tries to bow, but is shivering too hard; the coughing fit doubles him over ungracefully.

"Happy Christmas," he whispers through a raspy throat, both the Turners staring in shock.

"It is now," Will says, holding a glass of brandy to his lips, a little later.

"Welcome home," Elizabeth murmurs, chafing his wrists with her flannel.

Oh.  


### Touch

Gillette knows all the regulations of the navy; he would be willing to bet (if gambling were permitted) that he knows them better than anyone else, even in the Admiralty. He knows them, and he knows the consequences should a man disobey them.

But, as he stands at the stern of the _Lucinda_, his skin aches with loneliness, and he can understand why some men flaunt the decrees on sodomy. Captain Norrington comes up behind him and rests a hand on his shoulder for a moment, and he takes comfort in it.

### Lust

There had been other men. There had been _many_ men. There had been other captains; some, even, who deserved the title. But when Jack Sparrow (who was not yet Jack Sparrow) set foot on the _Black Pearl_'s deck for the first time, she shivered.

Her rigging ached when he laid a hand on the wheel.

His fingers curled round the spokes and she could barely hold back a groan of her timbers.

Canvas flapped above his head and Jack glanced up. There was no wind.

_Please_, the _Pearl_ thought in her own language. _Please, please, please, please_.

"Yes," Jack whispered.

### Rum

Jack had long since regretted introducing Bootstrap's son to the joys of alcohol; rum, specifically. He had, at first, objected deeply to it, which was merely annoying, but then he had taken to it with an eagerness which was _disturbing_.

"Right, lad," he said warily, reaching slowly for the bottle. "I think s'enough for one night, savvy?"

Will shook his head. "Not _nearly_ enough," he said, and batted Jack's arm away. Jack sighed, picked up his own mug, and decided to give up for the night.

"Right," he said, and drained the mug.

Several hours later, Will was beginning to see the irritation of a world in which not everyone was either as drunk as he or as intelligent as he. "Nooooooo," he explained again. Somehow the conversation had wandered into a discussion of Commodore Norrington, and Will felt he was the true authority at the table. "It's, it's horribly like being drunk."

He nodded. Jack blinked muzzily. "'S so bad," he said, and yawned. "About being drunk, Will? I like it, meself."

"Pervert," Will said happily. "What d'you think the rum thinks about being drunked? Drunken. Droonk."

"Dunno that I've ever asked," Jack said. "Have you?"

Will looked around conspiratorally and leaned forward. "I _have_," he whispered.

### Compass

"Bad luck, mate," Bill said, tucking the compass into his pocket. The man waved a hand.

"The dice does as she please," he said, one gold tooth denting his lower lip like a dog's fang. He scooped up the battered-looking dice, turning the snake-eyes over, and dropped them into his sack full of bones and horsehair ties.

Bill stood, stretching. "I've watch tonight," he said, "or I'd give you a chance to win it back."

"If it didn't stay, it weren't wanting to," the man said, and grinned. All his teeth were gold, Bill saw with a shiver. "Watch well, then."

"Creepy _bastard_," Bill said with feeling, later that night. Jack was stretched out in the hammock behind him, but he knew Jack wasn't asleep—his breath hadn't settled into the steady whistle of the truly dozing. "Just as glad I've the watch tonight, and I've got a nice new pretty compass to boot."

"Lessee," Jack said around a yawn. Bill flipped the compass over his shoulder and went on loosening the knots in the rope holding up Smitty's berth. "Bill," Jack said, "It don't point north."

"Turn it around," Bill said, and gave one final yank to the hemp.

"Bill," Jack repeated. He sounded almost worried. "I'm telling you, mate, that creepy bastard gave you a broken compass as winnings."

"Bastard," Bill grumbled, snatching it out of Jack's hands. He shook the case, but the needle swung stubbornly from northeast to southwest and back again, dipping briefly toward northwest. "Bastard," he repeated, and rubbed a thumb over the skull etched into the leather of the case.

"We'll find him in the morning," Jack mumbled. "Make him pay up properlike."

"All right," Bill said, and rubbed Jack's shoulder.

"Nobody cheats Bootstrap," Jack said, and his breath evened out. Bill smiled and tossed the compass back into his trunk before turning to clamber abovedecks.

Be a pity not to wish Smitty a good night before the man tried to get a few hours of rest, after all.

### Lies

"Soon," she said. "I promise."

Will nodded, his eyes full of sleep and trust, and padded up the stairs to their bedroom. "G'night, mam," he called down from the doorway, a yawn breaking through the last syllable.

"Good night," she said, too soft for him to hear her.

Have a good night, she thought, desperately, her fingers clenching the tattered, stained piece of paper. Have a night free of care and worry and guilt, my son; because — _soon­_ — you'll know my nightmares, that your father will never come home, that you'll hate me for having promised you he would.

### The navy

Murtogg and Mullroy have never been properly introduced. They grew up separated by three villages and a county line; Mullroy's elder sister married a man who lived three houses away from Murtogg, but Murtogg was visiting his mother's old maiden aunt in Sussex that month. They joined the navy eight months apart; Murtogg was sent to the _Splendour_, Mullroy, the _Hyaline_. They saw action first on the same day, in the same battle, and were wounded in the same spot.

They don't know any of this. They just know that they're brothers, and that no matter what happens, that won't change.

### Death

"At least tell me he was drunk," Elizabeth mumbles, her grief a bitter taste in the back of her throat, choking her, so that when she tries to swallow, she chokes. She turns her head blindly into Will's shoulder, her breath shuddering. His arm tightens around her waist.

He was drunk.

"At least tell me it was good rum," she says, laughing a little, because what else can she do? What else is there to do? (Sell the gaudy decorations in the _Black Pearl_'s cabin, at last? At least.) But she and Will know —knew— him (love—loved—him), and it comes as no surprise to either of them that it wasn't. Jack never made any sense, never did the expected, and it makes as much sense as anything else (none at all) (no truth at all) that he should die in a tavern fight over bad rum.

### Tales

The story of the pirate and the blacksmith and the beautiful governor's daughter spreads rapidly, despite all Norrington's efforts to contain it. Like all tales, of course, it changes and morphs and grows in the telling.

When an old man, thirty years later, overhears some particularly fantastic extrapolation, he startles everyone in the Dancing Dove when he throws his empty bottle of rum across the room and shouts, "Horseshit! That's horseshit! His name was Will Turner and his father was Bootstrap Bill Turner, and he was a _good man_!"

### Hangman's noose

Those born to hang will never drown. Gibbs was six weeks old when he watched his first man hang; his mother had a taste for public executions, and he saw the spectacle fifty-nine times by his first birthday. He's sure he remembers all of them.

He remembers Lewis Doughty, who looked straight at the six-year-old Gibbs and smiled, as if recognizing him.

When he set sail on his first navy ship, there was a terrible hurricane six weeks off land; there was such confidence in his voice when he told shipmates they wouldn't founder that they believed him. They didn't ask how he knew.

Gibbs fears no storm, no capsized ship. He's been waiting for the noose all his life.

### Anchor

Will is no pirate. It has taken Elizabeth far too long to realize this, and longer still to admit it, but Will is a blacksmith, law-abiding — more than that, fair in all his dealings. He is iron, air controlled and directed by the bellows, muscle and heavy bone.

Every ship needs an anchor, and Elizabeth's — whose spine is a mast, whose skirts are sails — is Will.

### Maps

The long, narrow red lines on his forearms — Shanghai and a bamboo whip. The swathe of shiny, pale pink skin on his left palm — a battle in the South Atlantic that he doesn't want to explain. The three red dots on his right ankle — he, Bootstrap, and Hector all got them, one very drunken evening in Marseilles.

Port-wine-colored stain on the back of his neck — born with it in Dublin.

Short, raised scars on his knuckles — fisticuffs over cards in a New Orleans whorehouse, and someone (he doesn't know who) bit him.

Jack's body is a map, and James has become its expert cartographer.

### A ship's articles

  


> If any officer, mariner, soldier or other person in the fleet, shall strike any of his superior officers, or draw, or offer to draw, or lift up any weapon against him, being in the execution of his office, on any pretence whatsoever, every such person being convicted of any such offense, by the sentence of a court martial, shall suffer death.

The trouble was the ambiguity. He didn't mind not being in the navy, although it would have been nice to have had some opportunity for advancement; he had neither the compleat freedom from the naval hierarchy of the civilian nor the recompense of even a middy. And what was he to do? Will Turner was Port Royal's mongrel dog, and there was nothing he could do about it. The smithy wasn't his, it was Brown's, even if the work coming out of it was his. The soldiers had long considered him below their notice, even as the officers paid him for shoeing their horses; Norrington no longer clapped him on the shoulder in the street and stole time on Tuesday mornings for his instruction. He saw Elizabeth only when coincidence was on his side; coincidence had been cancelled, by order of the Admiralty. What Elizabeth didn't understand was that he had already earned the noose; that his reckless attempt to save Jack was an attempt to save himself.

### Marooned

James knows all the stories of Captain Jack Sparrow. Don't take that as anything more than it is, however — he knows all the stories of all the pirates.

But he didn't know how Jack — _Captain_ Jack Sparrow, he hears the man himself murmur — was marooned on that tiny spit of land once before. He finds that out one wind-strewn day nearly a year after the aborted hanging; he's one of the few permitted to call during Mistress Turner's confinement (obscurely, both Will and Elizabeth consider him family), and she tells him then, in her sitting-room.

Her voice is a steady hum, the cadence of it like endless waves, with sudden bubbles of laughter and irritation lighting it up, like sun above or mother-of-pearl below. She's always tired now; the babe in her belly makes sleep elusive, and she dozes off for a few seconds at the climax of the tale. He doesn't mind, much.

Afterwards, when he has wished her continued good health and walked back down the dusty road to his house, he picks up his pistol, with its pearl grips and finely grooved bore and intricate mechanism, and touches it lightly to his palm, the base of his throat, his temple.

"The right bullet for the right man," he says softly in the gathering darkness. "And only one chance at that."

### Cutlass

"So," Jack says idly, "who was it, taught you swordplay?"

Will huffs a snort of laughter at that, his fingers roaming up and down Jack's spine. Jack groans a little as Will's fingers hit a particular knot, and wriggles away from the insistent pressure. This has the not unpleasant effect of creating friction between his own cock and Will's. "No one," Will says.

"Liar."

"It wasn't —" he starts, and sighs. "Get off me, you lummox, you're sticky and I can't breathe."

Jack leers. "_I'm _sticky?" he says, disbelief dropping from every syllable as sweat had dripped from his skin only minutes before. He wriggles again.

"Fine," Will snaps. "_We're_ sticky and I _still_ can't breathe!"

The wriggle does not seem to have had its desired effect; pity, that, especially since that was how Jack had planned on cheating.

"If I get off you," Jack says amiably, the very soul of reason, "you'll tell me who taught you swordplay?"

"It wasn't _like_ that," Will mumbles. "Fine, yes, anything."

Jack grins and nestles into the bed, already worn to the shapes of the bodies within it. Will groans. "Don't laugh," he warns, "I was thirteen," he begins, "it was about a year after we'd arrived in the _Carolina_, and I was bored. Bored, and lonely, and..." he shrugs. "So I snuck out of services, and went up to the fort. I wanted to see if the cannon were being used that I'd helped fix, the week before. I went into Captain Norrington's office, because it was hot, and there was shade there, and there was a cutlass on the table."

He pauses, remembering the glint of the metal in the dim room, the way the table around it was bare wood, papers stacked everywhere else, but not there, and smiles.

"I picked it up," he says, his voice softer, "and I swung it a few times."

"Kill anything?" Jack asks, rubbing his head  
against Will's shoulder, like the mousing-cat he hates.

"No. But I liked it. I liked the way it felt in my hand. So I took it."

"You?" Jack says, incredulous. "You _stole_ Norrington's cutlass? When you were thirteen?"

"I told you not to laugh," Will grumbles. He's blushing.

"You son of a pirate," Jack says, and the blush, while still there, transforms into an impressive glare.

"He came down to Mr Brown's the next day," Will says, still glaring — and from only two inches away, the skin between Jack's eyes will begin to blister soon — "and took me out back and said that if I had to sneak out of services, I should do it when Lieutenant Gillette wasn't standing at the back, and that I shouldn't go up to the fort when Lieutenant Grove was on duty — I _told_ you not to laugh — if I didn't want to get caught, and if I was going to steal blades I was going to learn to use them."

"And?" Jack prompts, stifling his snickers.

"And I learned," Will says, his mouth flattening into a thin line for a moment. "He taught me. Beat me black and blue the first time, and after that..." he takes a breath. "I was a match for him by the time I was sixteen," he says proudly. "Better by my eighteenth birthday."

"Better'n him any day," Jack says, and the story turns to kisses sharp as knives.


End file.
